Bill C. Malone opens his 2010 book Country Music, U.S.A., stating that country music “defies precise definition, and no term (not even ‘country’) has ever successfully encapsulated its essence” (Malone 2010, 1). In the past century, the ‘country music’ genre has […]
In 1960, Willie Nelson famously drove into Nashville in his broken-down 1950 Buick, looking to sell his songs to the city’s top music producers. Not long after he got to Music Row, his car died. After a few days in […]
These sixteen tracks date to Price’s mid-80s deal with Snuff Garrett’s short-lived Viva label. At the time, their collaboration resulted in the 1983 album Master of the Art, seven low charting singles and several tracks placed in the films of […]
While George Jones and Merle Haggard have found a whole new fan base among contemporary generations, Ray Price, a similarly monumental and influential country artist, has worked in recent years on a much more low-key level that, deliberately or not, […]
Ray Price’s chart career usually gets talked about as if it has two distinct periods. First there are the great honky-tonk years that included masterpiece singles such as “Crazy Arms”, and then there’s his crappy, post-“Danny Boy” countrypolitan hits like […]
One of the best things about neotradionlists such as the Derailers and Dale Watson is that they present an opportunity to learn about the people who inspired them. There seems to be no end to the worshipping of honky-tonk legends, […]
